by Dar Williams
Dad nodded. “That is exactly what it was, Ama. And she gave us more than you. She gave us herself. She was a really fun, loving girl. And she was an alcoholic. It’s amazing how many friends I’ve had who have stopped drinking. I wonder what it would be like today if Sally had stopped and were still here.”
I thought of Frog X.
“Anyway, Ama, we saw your movie, put our heads together, and decided we should let you know more about her,” Dad said. He handed me the black-eyed Susans. “First of all, these were her favorite flowers.”
I felt my eyes tearing up already. Was it because I remembered the supermarket receipt with the flowers? I could see a kid with long hair, shorts and boys’ white socks running down the aisle to add this to her mother’s groceries at the check-out line. “Pleeease?” she was asking.
Or maybe it was that the black-eyed Susan was such a simple flower. I thought of how she called her mother’s awards and degrees “fancy prizes.” She stuck up for unfancy things and said they were the most beautiful. They were also cheap and easy to find. They were the kind of thing your husband could get for you even if he wasn’t rich. She didn’t need a boat or a big house or a giant bottle of champagne. She was Frog X. But she was also the kind of person who cared about Frog X, the unflashy, the unwealthy. Didn’t Dad say she loved animals?
We crossed the line into Connecticut. We took the same exit we had taken for my grandmother’s house.
Joyce turned to me and said, “Honey, we’re going to take you someplace. We’ll be with you the whole time. We’re with you.”
“I think this is the right thing to do,” Dad said.
Ahead were the gates to a big cemetery.
“She’s buried here,” I said. I didn’t even have to ask. “I’m bringing flowers to leave at her gravestone.”
“Yes,” Dad said. “If you want. We’re all going. You can stay in the car, but I thought you’d want to go.”
I didn’t want to look at the gravestone with Dad’s friends. I didn’t even want to go with my dad. They didn’t know the same girl I knew, the one with the flowers and the barrettes and the rhymes and even the way she loved the big champagne bottle full of coins. “Can I go alone?” I asked.
“I thought you might ask to do that.” Dad sighed.
“And?”
“Just a minute.” Dad and Phyllis ran out and found a directory at the entrance of the cemetery that they scanned. I could tell they were discussing my request.
Joyce said, “Do you really want to do this alone?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Why?” Joyce asked.
“It’s my mother.”
Phyllis and Dad got back in the car.
“She’s going alone,” Joyce told them.
“You think that’s a good idea?” Phyllis asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s her idea, and it’s her right. It’s her mother,” Joyce said, echoing me.
Dad and Phyllis took this under consideration and then nodded in agreement.
Dad said, “I am more than happy to go with you, just me, and I actually would prefer it.”
“And it would be safer,” Phyllis added.
“I’ll do it alone,” I said.
“Okay. We’ll drive up the road. We’ll never have you out of our peripheral vision if you want to flag us down,” Phyllis said.
“Here we are,” Dr. Nurstrom said nervously.
“Is this too much?” Dad asked.
I didn’t know if it was too much. “No,” I said.
“I’m the therapist. Blame it on me. I say she can handle it,” Joyce said, coming out to open my door for me.
Dad walked over to a small, plain gravestone and looked at it. He shook his head. “There it is,” he said. I stood next to him and saw the name. Within the cluster of shiny stones that said WESTON was SALLY WESTON. There was her whole name and the dates she was alive, 1970–1994.
It was the best evidence I’d ever had that she’d been alive, better than the receipts or even the flowers I was holding. She didn’t just live in stories.
“I’m going to the car,” Dad said. “We’ll leave you for fifteen minutes. I know myself. I can’t bear to leave you any longer than that.”
Dad knew me, too. He knew I liked to take things on alone at first. Dad walked to the car, and Dr. Nurstrom slowly drove away.
I couldn’t be silent as I looked at Sally’s name, so I took a breath and reminded myself that nobody was going to tell me I sounded stupid. “Hi, Sally,” I started. “These are for you. They’re from my — from David.” I put the flowers down. The simple gravestone matched the simple wildflowers. “I am Amalee. I am your daughter, and as you know, we never knew each other. I hardly even knew about you until this summer. I’m actually sorry about that. I wish I’d asked more about you. And I met your mother, too. And you know what? She was sorry, too. She wanted to know you better. When she died, she left me … guess what she left me? She left me that bottle of coins. And she told me to spend it now.” I told her I’d just made a movie about endangered species with the money from the huge bottle of coins. I could barely see the car up ahead, and I felt very alone with this unshiny, simple gray gravestone. “I’m not angry that you left and all that,” I blurted out, afraid that I didn’t have much longer to talk. This was the closest I’d ever come to speaking to her. “I know about your problem. But you didn’t do anything bad to me. I don’t need a mother, because all the people you knew who went to college with Dad are still around: John, Carolyn, Joyce, and Phyllis. They’re always at the house. Or we go to John’s restaurant, which is awesome. They say they really like doing parent things with me. It really works the way it is. But, of course, I am your daughter.”
That did it. That’s when I sat down and started to cry. I traced her name with my finger. I was her daughter. There would be plenty of time for me to go back to talking about that girl named Sally I’d never known, but I let things be different today. And as crazy as it was, I knew one thing was true. The secret was out. I loved my mom.
I heard footsteps behind me and wheeled around in terror. It was Dad. I didn’t have time to dry my tears.
“You scared me!” I said.
“Sorry,” he panted. He caught his breath and hugged me. It almost felt like a big John hug. “She really was special,” he said, resting his cheek on the top of my head for a moment. “She just didn’t feel … finished. I have a hard time remembering her as a person, because I spent so much time hoping that she would become the person she wanted to be.”
“She was a person,” I said.
“Yeah, she was. And I was so caught up in trying to help her, I didn’t help her. I saw her as a problem to solve, like a fixer-upper.”
“I understand why you would try to help,” I told him.
“Sure. But I regret that I never treated her like a person to you. You have a right to know you had a mother, not a silly Sally who never grew up. She was your mother. And you also have the right to imagine what it would have been like if she had stayed and been your mom.”
“I have thought of that, sometimes,” I admitted.
“Do you need more time?” Dad asked.
I looked over at the flowers and at her name. A door had closed. I couldn’t imagine talking to the gravestone and believing that anyone could hear me. I’d said what I needed to say, and now she was a young woman named Sally again. “We can go,” I said, but my visit had been a very good idea. I knew that I would never feel completely separate from her again.
At lunch, Joyce talked about decorating the baby’s room, clearly getting away from the topic of my mother and cemeteries. “Guess what I’m thinking of for the wallpaper?” she asked me. “Frogs. Little smiling bullfrogs. It’s just a coincidence, but I think that’s perfect. When little person is old enough, I’ll tell him or her about Amalee’s important movie.”
“I’ll teach him or her how to use a camera. Once I’ve learned, of course,” I said.
“
Ama’s going to take some film classes,” Dad said.
“I’ll film little person, too,” I told Joyce and Dr. Nurstrom.
“Thank you,” said Dr. Nurstrom. He, too, used the expression little person that Joyce had come up with. “We’d love to have some footage of little person, and I’m no good with cameras.”
“How would you like to make a film about childbirth?” Joyce asked.
“I think I’ll stick to environmental science for now,” I said. “Maybe I’ll change my mind.”
I thought about Joyce on the way home. She was not like my mother. She was so excited about having a baby that she’d picked out special towels, pillows, and rugs. That didn’t make me feel sorry for myself, though, because Joyce had been just as excited about me. I still remembered when she took me shoe shopping. I was four. She asked if I wanted a matching purse.
Sarah was waiting for me on the front step as we pulled in the driveway.
We all apologized as we got out of the car. I had totally forgotten that she was coming.
Sarah waved us all off and said she’d already let herself in and gone through our refrigerator. Joyce said that sounded like a good idea and headed inside. Sarah tugged my arm and walked me away from the house in the other direction from Kyle’s house, possibly because his truck was in his driveway.
“Guess who I talked with?” Sarah asked, speeding me towards the same hill I’d wiped out on.
“Curt?”
“Just now,” Sarah said.
“Kyle?”
“Uh-huh. Guess who we talked about? You.” Sarah answered herself.
I held still. This was another time I wanted to hear the whole story without distractions.
Sarah said it went something like this:
Sarah asked, “So, Amalee’s movie was pretty great, wasn’t it?”
“She’s a genius,” Kyle said.
“And didn’t she look so great when she was standing up there at the end, getting her award?”
“She’s pretty,” Kyle answered. “And in a couple years, she’s going to be a knockout.”
I wanted to jump up and down, but I saw Sarah was already doing it for me. “Pretty! Pretty! I mean, I think you’re pretty, too, but he said it.”
“But I’m not a knockout,” I pointed out, still happy that he even thought about the way I looked.
“Oh, please, you know that we’re going to look better in high school. And by the way, isn’t it cool that he thinks you’re a genius?”
We stepped to the side of the road to let a car pass, but it slowed down instead. We turned to see Kyle opening the passenger window. “You guys need a ride?” he asked.
Sarah and I started laughing. No, it was giggling. We were definitely twelve years old. “No, thank you,” I said as seriously as I could. I got a sudden pang of fear thinking what would happen if Kyle actually asked me on a date. I suddenly decided I would wait for a while before that happened. I could see how I was feeling after I got my braces off. I’d probably wear them for a year. I felt better. Wait a year.
Kyle drove off with a friendly smile, completely unaware of the decision I’d made. No Kyle. At least, not yet.
When we got home, Sarah laid out the three outfits she was thinking of wearing to school the next day. We decided that she would wear blue pants with a green shirt and I would wear green pants with a blue shirt, so that if we were having a bad first day, we could remember that we weren’t alone, but not matching so much that we stood out. I thought of Ellen in my head saying that our idea was ridiculous, but then I thought of Hallie wishing she could wear matching clothes like a secret code on the first day, too. Things had really changed.
We went to dinner at John’s restaurant. Dad had invited Ms. Severence, as I’d given him permission to do. She was at the restaurant, along with Carolyn, Phyllis, Joyce, Dr. Nurstrom, and, of course, John, who was starting a new menu to welcome the fall.
Phyllis asked us what we were hoping would happen in the eighth grade, and we lied. Sarah wanted Curt to say he was head-over-heels in love with her, and I was hoping my science teacher would move or go to jail or something. Everyone knew she was crazy, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I would say to adults. Sarah and I said we hoped we liked algebra.
“You’re going to love it,” Phyllis said passionately.
Ms. Severence said, “It’s such a fine line. On the one hand, it’s important for me to know what I want the school year to be, but then again, I always have to remind myself not to let my expectations get in the way of enjoying what actually happens.” What an un-Sally thing to say. I looked over to see what Dad thought of this. He was nodding and frowning. I think he was frowning for me, just to prove that he wouldn’t be showing any signs of being in love tonight. I also noticed that he and Ms. Severence never touched each other once. They didn’t even sit next to each other. Ms. Severence looked over and smiled at me. I could almost see her as not a teacher. That was a start.
The next morning, Sarah and I headed for school on foot. There was a path through the woods behind my house, the same woods where I’d heard the peeping frogs and thought they should narrate a movie. This summer was a story that was better than my expectations. We emerged from the woods to see a traffic jam of busses and cars and hundreds of kids pouring out of them.
“Hello, eighth grade,” Sarah muttered.
“Wow. It’s so busy,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. Then she laughed. “You know what they look like to me? They look like frogs. Look at those two little tree frogs who are very fascinating, indeed.” She pointed to a pair of twins, all in pink, emerging from the back of a car. They held hands for a second, then dropped them, realizing that they didn’t want to be called babies on their first day at this new school. Beautiful frogs.
“Oh, and look, there’s the actual Frog X!”
“Where?” I asked, wishing I could see Sally in her white socks and sparkly hair clips, but Sarah was just pointing to Lenore, who had stepped off the bus looking ready for the worst. Or was she? She didn’t have her books clamped as tightly to her chest as she had last year.
Sarah was right about how it all looked. I could see the whole school as frogs: climbing, jumping, peering out of windows, and bouncing on the sidewalks, the skinny leopard frogs, the big bullfrogs, the glittering poison dart frogs, and the awkward frogs that didn’t have any particular markings or colors.
“There’s a mutated frog.” Sarah pointed to a boy on crutches.
“Sarah!” I said.
“It’s not a bad thing. I’m the two-headed frog. He’s my brother!” Sarah protested.
I sighed. “Ready for this?” I asked, heading toward my homeroom.
“Sure!” Sarah joked. Then she took my hand and squeezed it before she headed in the other direction.
So much had changed in two years. I had friends. I had things that I wanted to do. I had plans to take a film course. My favorite sixth-grade teacher wanted to be my new friend. And all of these kids, instead of looking like a big mass of trouble I’d have to wade through to reach the other end of eighth grade, were interesting to me. Who would they be this year? Some of them held the answers to important questions. One of them might invent a cure for cancer because of something he learned in science class. One of them might need us to notice her. It was impossible to know who would be important to me, and why, and who I might be important to.
For all the things I couldn’t predict, however, I had the gift of knowing that, as I headed into this crowded school, this massive rain forest, this endangered world, the everythingness of everything, all I could do, and all I had to do, was listen and watch and learn.
Many thanks to the people who helped with the science of everything: Shelia Sinclair, Melissa Loge, and Jime Rice at the New England Aquarium, the Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary in Wellfleet Bay, Chris and Didi Raxworthy, Sarah Gubbins (and Chicago Research Support), and the Museum of Natural History. Also, thanks to Patty Romanoff, Nerissa Nields, Melinda,
Pete, and family, the Flanagans, Patty Larkin, Bette Warner, Ruby and Rosa Xiaodan, Ron Fierstein, Jennifer Coia, Sacks & Co., David Levithan and all the friendly help from Scholastic, and the Robinson and Williams families, especially Michael.
Dar Williams is one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of her generation. Her albums include My Better Self, The Beauty of the Rain, The Green World, End of the Summer, Mortal City, and The Honesty Room. Visit her at www.darwilliams.com.
This book was originally published in hardcover by Scholastic Press in 2006.
Copyright © 2006 by Dar Williams. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First Scholastic paperback printing, June 2008
Cover art © by Jo Quinn
Cover design by Alison Klapthor
e-ISBN 978-0-545-30021-6
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
